O'Reilly media founder Tim O'Reilly is "the most powerful voice" in open source, followed by Linux chief architect Linus Torvalds, Google executive Chris Messina, ex-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and Gnome and Mono founder Miguel de Icaza, according to a new ranking of influential open source personalities.
Torvalds was named the most influential blogger in open source, however, despite ranking behind O'Reilly in the overall metric, which includes various Twitter analysis tools and Google Trends.

Torvalds isn't the most active blogger, with his most recent post coming on Feb. 24, and many of his posts are about personal activities. But when he does speak about Linux or open source his words carry a lot of weight.

O'Reilly tweets many times a day and has more than 1.4 million followers.

Open source collaboration vendor MindTouch is releasing the ranking Wednesday in conjunction with the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. The vendor came up with a top 50 list after grading about 200 open source commentators on how much buzz is created by their blog posts, tweets and other messages.

The list is clearly not a definitive ranking of which people influence the open source community the most. Only executives devoted to Twitter and blogging are likely to make the cut. But at the very least, Mindtouch executives say the 50 people on the list are ones the open source community should be paying attention to.